Category: Political Correctness

Auto Added by WPeMatico

You heard it here first

Female sexual restraint  is the basis of civilizational progress.

The matriarchy disincentivizes male energy.

The matriarchy is the result of female liberation.

A feminist future is an oxymoron.

Feeling better now?

By way of contradiction, if this video represented the whole truth, why are Islamic societies so fucked up? Disposable male energy is obviously not the whole answer, else these Islamic  fuckheads would be running the world, as they think they ought to be, but so clearly are not. So there must be some other factors at work besides female chastity and suppressed sexuality that make for progress. Free inquiry?

 

Whittaker Chambers

 

Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) was, from his mid twenties until his late thirties, a Communist and a spy for Soviet military intelligence (the GRU), who departed the Communist Party and his spying, and became a senior editor of Time magazine. He was a very gifted writer, and wrote a truly great book, Witness. His insights into what Communism was, why it nearly succeeded, and the enormous difficulty many Americans had in believing that there was anything the matter with the Soviet Union, are relevant to this day.

Books I read compete for my attention. I keep three or four on the go and more ready to to take up the slack at any time. At the moment, Witness has blown past the other respectable contestants by a furlong and is heading down the track to claim the prize.

People of a certain age will be forgiven for not understanding how much the 20th century was shaped by the Communist promise. It fell like Sauron’s Barad-Dür in 1989, contrary to every respectable opinion leader in western society, except the true hardened east European anti-Communists, to whom no one paid much attention.

Whittaker Chambers remarks that the driving force of Western intellectuals supporting the Party was not a belief in the economic doctrines of Marx, which hardly anyone read, but the promise of an egalitarian society and the end of material want. The age old and senseless suffering of man could at last come to an end, and if it took a few crimes to achieve it, then it was worth it. They had the Plan. No one else did.

It must be recalled that the Soviet Union, betrayed in its alliance with Hitler, took most of the casualties of World War 2. There was deep-rooted appreciation for the Soviet Union and its wartime sacrifices across most sectors of enlightened liberal opinion until at least 1948 and longer. The desirability of central planning of the economy was an assumed truth in almost every quarter of literate opinion. I recall George Orwell reviewing a book by Hayek, the Road to Serfdom. Orwell was aghast at Hayek’s bold denunciation of central planning of the economy. Says Orwell:

Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.

But the vogue for central planning was underlain by a deep seated belief that Communism had the correct blueprint to understanding and acting in history.

Chambers’ view of Communism was that one could serve it for many years, and still not penetrate to its essence. Then, sooner or later, one would hear screams in the night.

Whittaker Chambers wrote:

What Communist has not heard those screams? Execution, says the Communist code, is the highest measure of social protection. What man can call himself a Communist who has not accepted the fact that Terror  is an instrument of policy, right if the vision is right, justified by history, enjoined by the balance of forces in the social wars of this century? Tose screams have reached every Communist’s mind. Usually they stop there. What judge willingly dwells upon the man the laws compel him to condemn to death – the laws of nations or the laws of history? (page xliv)

What provoked my interest was a passage much further along in the book concerning why the vast mass of American bien-pensants  revolted at the notion that Chambers was right in denouncing well-born native Americans who were part of his spy apparatus. Readers of this blog may be expected to have heard names like Alger Hiss or Harry Dexter White but may have forgotten the enormous brouhaha that erupted across the United states when in 1948 Chambers was summoned to publish his  accusations by a Congressional committee. Quite simply, he said these people were part of his spy ring. He knew so because he picked up documents from them weekly for years for the purpose of microfilming and passing on to Colonel Bykov, his GRU controller. Chambers was not believed by many liberals, and was sued by Alger Hiss for slander twice.  Hiss eventually went to prison for espionage. His guilt has been more than adequately proven by subsequent decrypts of Soviet signals traffic.

Chambers had to deal with the enmity of those who believed that Communism was basically a force for good in the world, and that he was wrong or mentally unbalanced for believing otherwise. Speaking of these “liberals”, Chambers wrote:

They were people who believed a number of things. Foremost among them was a belief that peace could be preserved, World War III could be averted only by conciliating the Soviet union. For this no p[rice was too high to pay, including the price of wilful historical self delusion. Yet they had just fiercely supported a war in which one of their ululant outcries had been against appeasement; and they were much too intelligent really to believe that Russia was a democracy or most of the other upside-down things they said in defense of it. Hence like most people who have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied the openness of mind which they prescribed for others. Let me call their peculiar condition… the Popular Front mind.

The Popular Front mind dominated American life, at least from 1938 to 1948….Particularly, it dominated all avenues of communication between the intellectuals and the nation. It told the nation what it should believe; it made up the nation’s mind for it. The Popular Fronters had made themselves the “experts”. They controlled the narrows of news and opinion. And though, to a practised ear, they never ceased to speak as the scribes, the nation heard in their fatal errors the voice of those having authority.  For the nation too, wanted peace above all things, and it meant it could not grasp or believe that a conspiracy on the scale of Communism was possible or that it had already made so deep a penetration into their lives.”

Does that remind you of something?

97% of scientists believe that ….?

Anthropogenic global warming?

Climate change?

I am waiting for the Whittaker Chambers of the anthropogenic global warming movement to write his book on the scale of the deception, the skullduggery and the extent of the conspiracy. It will be resisted to the same extent that Whittaker Chamber’s testimony was, and by the same sorts of people. The AGW thing has not arisen to totalitarian power anywhere yet, but not for want of trying.

In any case, for any number of reasons,  Witness makes for compelling reading, not least because it is a great story well told about the struggles of the 20th century, and of a man and his God.

 

True believers

Totalitarian sumptuary

 

Last night we were talking about Trump, and my friend accused me of being a ‘true believer’. I took his meaning to be that I had suspended my critical faculties in regard to Trump.

So I have had occasion to self-interrogate: am I a true believer? Do I, or have I, suspended critical analysis?

If the accusation had come from a fanatic for Hillary, it might have been dismissed. But he is not blind, and is mostly shrewd. My friend was strongly against the second Iraqi invasion, and ranted for about ten years about Iraqi civilian casualties, to the point of being  insufferable at times. In the perspective of history, it can be argued that the second Iraqi invasion by the United States was destabilizing, a waste of resources, and accomplished nothing. It might even be argued that Saddam should still be  on the throne, even if it meant that Saddam would get away with killing 30,000 Iraqis a year, as was his wont. It can certainly be argued, as the late George Jonas did, that Saddam should have been deposed and hanged, and the US should have got out shortly after his capture.

So my friend can be right at times for bad or poorly articulated reasons. Same as me, I suppose.

To the best of my ability, I try to stay skeptical about Trump, without succumbing to enthusiasm. What bugs me about the anti-Trumpians is the same as the global warming catastrophists: their opposition seems demented and irrational. The arguments always seem to come down to a firm belief in their own moral righteousness, deviation from which is not merely error, but sin. Their arguments come down to mantras like “97%”, or virtue signalling, and professions of their moral superiority, Trump’s manifest limitations of character, and hence their correctness.

But I keep thinking, what if that crazed fucker actually solves a world problem or two? What would it be like to have an Iran which was afraid of the United States? A North Korea that was relatively pacific? A China that was working constructively with the US? A Canada without milk marketing boards? [to reduce it to the purely local]. A United States with a simplified tax system and lower rates?

To be a conservative is to be concerned with error, particularly one’s own. A system of government designed around the reality of fallibility results from concerns for error, for over-concentration of power, for the excesses of popular will.

I happen to think the constitution of the United States goes too far in dispersing power, and that a great deal of the irresponsibility of its constituent parts derives from an excessive concern for a recurrence of George III. Nonetheless, I continue to suspect the political system can turn at any moment into tyranny when popular enthusiams are not sufficiently constrained.

Does that make me a tory? Yes. Does it make me a conservative? Well yes, but of a liberal society.

What mostly concerns me about the anti-Trumpians and the global warming catastrophists is a shared conviction of their righteousness, and an imperviousness to evidence. No amount of evidence seems enough to jolt them from their doctrinal assurance.

Who is the true believer in that case?

 

 

Tacitus on the Germans

 

Cornelius Tacitus was a Roman historian, prose stylist, senator, consul and provincial governor.  He lived roughly from 56 AD to after 117 AD. He wrote a famous description of the German tribes, their lives, and customs, called Germania. Read it.

“For myself, I accept the view that the peoples of Germany have never contaminated themselves by intermarriage with foreigners but remain of pure blood, distinct and unlike any other nation.  One result of this is that their physical characteristics, in so far as one can generalize about so large a population, are always the same: fierce-looking blue eyes, reddish hair, and big frames – which, however, can exert their strength only by means of violent effort. They are less able to endure toil or fatiguing tasks and cannot bear thirst or heat, though their climate has inured them to cold spells and the poverty of their soils to hunger.”

What I most admire in books written before late 20th century governmental and self-imposed censorship is the treatment of different peoples in terms that are always more accurate than not because they are racial, tribal, or national, as appropriate.

It is not racist to discuss races in racial terms. What is so shocking to us is that people did so freely and without malice or condescension before about 1960. This is what they were like, these authors tell us.

You can read the same unselfconscious frankness in Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of black people in his Notes on Virginia or Francis Parkman’s descriptions of the Hurons, Iroqouis, French and English in his great works of early North American history.

That is what was so surprizing about these authors: their complete freedom to describe people as they saw them, without a Human Rights Commission on their back.

We are not living in a time of intellectual freedom. We are living in a time that future generations may well call a Great Darkness.

Coming Apart: The French Version

 

The French situation is described here in terms that make America’s situation look mild and reconciled by comparison. I have seldom gained so much insight from an article, anytime.

The French: coming apart, by Christopher Caldwell

 

Guilluy {a French social scientist} has tried to clarify French politics with an original theory of political correctness. The dominance of metropolitan elites has made it hard even to describe the most important conflicts in France, except in terms that conform to their way of viewing the world. In the last decade of the twentieth century, Western statesmen sang the praises of the free market. In our own time, they defend the “open society”—a wider concept that embraces not just the free market but also the welcoming and promotion of people of different races, religions, and sexualities. The result, in terms of policy, is a number of what Guilluy calls “top-down social movements.”

In France, political correctness is more than a ridiculous set of opinions; it’s also—and primarily—a tool of government coercion. Not only does it tilt any political discussion in favor of one set of arguments; it also gives the ruling class a doubt-expelling myth that provides a constant boost to morale and esprit de corps, much as class systems did in the days before democracy. People tend to snicker when the question of political correctness is raised: its practitioners because no one wants to be thought politically correct; and its targets because no one wants to admit to being coerced. But it determines the current polarity in French politics. Where you stand depends largely on whether you believe that antiracism is a sincere response to a genuine upsurge of public hatred or an opportunistic posture for elites seeking to justify their rule.

 

In a French context, he would be seen as among those in left-wing circles on whom certain civilizational truths once considered “conservative” have dawned. These include the novelist Michel Houellebecq, the philosopher Michel Onfray, and the political philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa, who has been heavily influenced by American historian Christopher Lasch. Guilluy, too, acknowledges Lasch’s influence, and one hears it when he writes, in La France périphérique, of family and community as constituting “the capital of the poor.”

Since Tocqueville, we have understood that our democratic societies are emulative. Nobody wants to be thought a bigot if the membership board of the country club takes pride in its multiculturalism. But as the prospect of rising in the world is hampered or extinguished, the inducements to ideological conformism weaken. Dissent appears. Political correctness grows more draconian. Finally the ruling class reaches a dangerous stage, in which it begins to lose not only its legitimacy but also a sense of what its legitimacy rested on in the first place.

The inducements to ideological conformity are weakening, even in mellow comfortable Canada. Nowhere is rebellion more required than in respect of the supposed benefits of racial and cultural diversity.

Who says “multiculturalism” and “diversity” is the enemy of the nation-state. Those who oppose nationalism of any kind, even the mildest, hold the whip hand, and are not shy about flogging the natives to make them comply with our Brave New Order. The natives are beginning to rebel.

Discrimination is the basis of life

 

The need to feel oneself morally superior is the basic flaw undermining life in the liberal democracies today. As Satan (dressed as Al Pacino) says: “Vanity: my favourite sin.”

Discrimination is carried on by every cell of your body  billions of  times a second, or trillions. That is what keeps you alive. This is what keeps societies alive. I favour the restoration of (appropriate sorts of) discrimination to its proper place: the basis of morality. No right judgment can take place without the capacity to discriminate.

It has come to this

 

“Stop Islam”. No equivocation, no pussy-footing, no mincing words. “Stop Islam”. This in the country which produced Baruch Spinoza, gave rise to Amsterdam, and welcomed religious refugees from all over Europe even at the height of 17th century religious warfare.

The Daily Mail reports that the Turkish foreign minister has said that “Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders’ views were shared by all rival parties and were pushing Europe towards ‘wars of religion’.”

In short, all you Dutch white people are the same, social democrats, liberals, greenies, nationalists.
The outrage of the Left at Wilders (rightwing! extremist!) is well captured by Steve Sailer’s commentary in TakiMag this week.

Congressman Steve King (R-IA) has noticed just how extremist today’s respectable conventional wisdom has become. So King has been exercising a Trump-like knack for trolling the Establishment with blunt truths that enrage goodthinkers into revealing just how much their worldview is founded upon hatred of average Americans.

Over the weekend, King tweeted:

[Geert] Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.

Every time I try to think of myself as a moderate, along comes the frantic, hysterical reaction to obvious truths such Steve King just issued. I find myself asking, as I have occasion to do nearly every day, why is there is such anti-white animus from white people? I understand it coming from professional race grievors, even if it is the product of excessive tolerance by whites for subsidized attacks on ‘white’ civilization. But why is our civilization- yours and mine – so bent on self destruction?

Why is the statement, that “you cannot restore our civilization with someone else’s babies?” so electrifyingly horrid to the immense crowd of anti-white whites? I think these are the reasons.

First, because it is irrefutably true. Second, because it refers to the consequences of abortion, reduced fertility, and demographic collapse that feminism – for want of a better word – has engendered, but will not own up to. Third because it asserts that there might actually be such as thing as “our” civilization, which might have a racial or ethnic basis.

Touching three electrified rails at the same time!

I keep seeing this Thing, and I do not know what it is in essence, but in its effects, it is

  • anti-white
  • anti-male
  • anti-Christian

Yet I suspect that if this civilization had been founded by the female, the racially Mongol, and the Buddhist religion, then the Thing of which I speak would be equally anti-female, anti-racially Mongol, and anti-Buddhist. For myself it seems to be an inchoate rage of people who were never spanked, loved, restrained, and held to any standard of manners and comportment..

“We used to be the filter”

 

I was listening today to a journalist whom I rather like and do not agree with, Susan Delacourt. It was at a conference on digital governance. (Yes, cynics, I can see your eyes rolling). Susan is a decent sort of leftie, and in this case I use her to illustrate an issue about how the media have changed.

Her source of concern was a demonstration that occurred in Toronto recently where a bunch of Canadians were ranting about Islam, with the fear that some parliamentary motion was going to be the first step in the imposition of sharia law in Ontario.

Her comment on the issue of the media’s lack of control was this:

“We used to be the filter” and she added, sotto voce, “we have to go back to being the filter”. She said that, years ago, the racist rantings of a group of Ontarians upset about Islam, or anything else for that matter,  would simply not receive wider circulation. Now everything is on YouTube. To find the clip above I simply entered “Toronto meeting Islam parliamentary motion”.

The upside of the digital revolution has been the changed media landscape; the downside has been the same. Nothing can be stopped any longer from being published. No locker room talk of 15 years ago can escape it. No  picture of anyone with a dick in their mouth. No careless word, no angry remonstrance. No intemperate remark goes unpublished.  There is no filter any more. You cannot “pull a story”. There is no central control, there is no fixed set of reporters, editors and news outlets. Google has sucked the revenues out of the newspaper business. Reporters are working faster to shorter deadlines for less money, with no time to develop a source, correct an error, or get it right.

As Blair Atholl once remarked, the printing press had a five hundred year run. The 19th century hot linotype machine defined the range and circulation of the news-paper. As an industrial structure it is passing out of existence.

The result has been the diminishment of the status of the reporter, the media outlet, and the editor, as well as the elimination of thousands of newspaper jobs. News gathering is much more do-it-yourself. Citizen empowerment means any bozo can upload something to YouTube, and does.

But the upside has been the lessening of thought and speech controls. People who are pissed off about Islam can say so now. The “facts” of global warming can be disputed. The people against the European Union can reach out to one another. Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pat Condell, Nigel Farage, Trump: people that the media would like to turn off, not record, not hear from: they cannot be censored any longer.

The interesting thing about today’s comment from Ms. Delacourt was her frank admission that they used to practice censorship and would like to do so again. For better or worse, the days are gone when the bien-pensant media class exercized censorship, try as they might to restore it.

The battle over Trump has been as much about the by-passing of media controls as it has been about Republican versus Democrat. As we have seen, those who hate Trump go ballistic at every mis-statement, such as for example, his reference to “trouble last night in Sweden”, and they miss the main point that everyone else seems able to understand, that Sweden is in dire straits because of too many uncivilized Islamic immigrants. They strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

Moreover, the long-term suppression by the bien-pensants of what they believed people simply should not hear or see, was the cause of the build-up of popular resentment of the media. The job of selection, analysis, and assessment has passed out of the hands of a clerisy into the hands of the people. For better or worse. I say: for the better.

End days at the EPA, but no end to human folly

 

 

One of the great things about a change in power, for better or worse, is that what was impossible yesterday becomes today’s fait accompli. So it is with no small pleasure that I read that Trump is cutting $2 billion out of the US federal Environmental Protection Agency, specifically targeting global warming programs, and laying off 20% of the staff through layoffs, retirements and attrition.

Once the regulatory agency is no longer directing billions into proving man-caused global warming, then something like real scientific debate can resume.

The other day I read an article by Adam Pigott over at Milton Conservative. He was threatening to remind climate catastrophists of their pride, folly, intolerance, lunacy, rudeness, persecutions, mania, and stupidity for ever and ever. He writes:

Because the climate scam was too big. You pushed all of your chips into the centre of the table and said “all in” with a smug stare at us sitting on the other side of the felt. And you busted out. Not only have you busted out, but you don’t have any more chips to play. We’re not going to let you have any. From now on, every time you come up with some pathetic attempt to control populations through a fear-based con we will remind everyone of climate change. Every time governments attempt to hijack science to support a political agenda, we will bring up that old climate change bugbear. You are going to be shoved into the corner as the crazy bearded freak standing on the side of the road with his sign proclaiming the end of the world is nigh. We aren’t going to listen to you any more. You have proven yourselves too stupid or untrustworthy to participate in public discourse.

I would like to believe that the climate catastrophists will admit error and be humble. Only the most honest of them will do anything remotely like this, and they are few.  The whole edifice was constructed of lies, virtue signalling, herd-like orthodoxy, and smugness, and fed by moral self righteousness. Yet it seems to me that every sort of smelly little orthodoxy is composed of the same elements. Only the orthodoxies change, but not the fact that humans are are inclined to participate in them. I too, would like to fish-slap a few high-minded catastrophists, but I am not going to get the chance. Why? Because we meet only at funerals, or at church, or otherwise pleasant social occasions. Because they have moved on to the Trumpocalypse. Because the folly of the day has moved on. Because by being rude to people you persuade them only  that you are rude, not that you are right.

Moral outrage – for  which global warming catastrophism provides an enormous ongoing set of occasions – is explored in a recent study by Rothschild and Keefer. 

The results are not flattering to the perpetually outraged. A Reason magazine article summarizes its findings.

“Yet this conventional construction—moral outrage as the purview of the especially righteous—is “called into question” by research on guilt, they say.

Feelings of guilt are a direct threat to one’s sense that they are a moral person and, accordingly, research on guilt finds that this emotion elicits strategies aimed at alleviating guilt that do not always involve undoing one’s actions. Furthermore, research shows that individuals respond to reminders of their group’s moral culpability with feelings of outrage at third-party harm-doing. These findings suggest that feelings of moral outrage, long thought to be grounded solely in concerns with maintaining justice, may sometimes reflect efforts to maintain a moral identity.”

and further:

“Ultimately, the results of Rothschild and Keefer’s five studies were “consistent with recent research showing that outgroup-directed moral outrage can be elicited in response to perceived threats to the ingroup’s moral status,” write the authors. The findings also suggest that “outrage driven by moral identity concerns serves to compensate for the threat of personal or collective immorality” and the cognitive dissonance that it might elicit, and expose a “link between guilt and self-serving expressions of outrage that reflect a kind of ‘moral hypocrisy,’ or at least a non-moral form of anger with a moral facade.””

Which, as every conservative knows, is simply that the Left is holier than thou. But the conservative differs from the Leftist not in that one is holier-than-thou and the other is not. Rather, the conservative is aware that he can be a damn fool, and tried to limit his folly, intemperance, and wrath as  a matter of manners and personal virtue. So far as I can tell, the Leftist confuses his wrath for his virtue, and thinks that, the angrier he is at some injustice, the more virtuous he is being. Which is what the study just demonstrated.

Milo! What are they doing to you?

 

The Americans are not a forgiving lot. They can be harshly judgmental and moralistic. They can be dreadfully PC: left, right and centre.  Milo Yiannopoulos is in the process of finding out just how much.

Apparently he made some remarks at some point recently that young gay males might discover who they were by means of sex with older men, and he meant people in their late teens, but the wall has fallen in on him.

I cannot imagine Milo Yiannopoulos NOT having made such remarks at some point in his short and much exposed life. In fact he made them in some radio show somewhere where he thought he had licence to be outrageous. He has suddenly been made aware that the United States is a literal, irony-free society, and can summon a fury of self righteousness in a split second.

In case you have been living in isolation for the past six months Milo Yiannopoulos is a provocative British faggot who has been talking about the dangers of Islam, feminists and political correctness to gays and to freedom in general. He has been getting away with it because he is witty, charming, fundamentally intelligent, faggy, well spoken, and essentially sound in his arguments.

He draws the opprobrium of the political Left the way a tank draws fire on a battlefield; if you cannot knock it out, you are doomed. Yiannopoulos has been drawing fire towards himself, including full scale riots at the U of C campus at Berkeley.

The idea that this fairy imp is a conservative shows how desperate the situation has become. He is only conservative of the right to speak and think; he is in all senses of the word a liberal. He is for freedom in all its forms, especially of thought, speech and whom you can laugh at. Nor is he a leftist.

As the Daily mail reports:

On Monday, he wrote on Facebook: ‘I’m partly to blame. My own experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous.

‘But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, “advocacy.” I deeply regret that. People deal with things from their past in different ways.’

You can read about the whole sorry mess in the Daily Mail.
I can only sympathize with Milo. He has been leading the charge against the atrocious suppression of freedom everywhere. What he forgot to realize is that nothing said anywhere escapes being recorded these days. There is no locker room, there is no refuge, there is no isolated cabin in the woods where you can let off some intemperate, irresponsible, or genuinely offensive remarks without them being recorded, especially if once you have been identified as a troublemaker, a provocateur, or an aspiring political candidate.
He will do time in the dog house; and he will learn an important lesson, that even outrageous faggot provocateurs must always be mindful that Big Sister is watching and listening.
There will be more to this story. What a gift that has been to the political Left! Milo’s usefulness to the cause of freedom has been damaged. Let us hope this particular tank can be hauled off the field and sent to the repair shops for refurbishment and an upgrade.
The people of the United States also like a comeback.
[If by chance you are stupid enough to believe that I endorse pedophilia in writing in defence of Milo, would you be so good as to find another blog to read? Thank you.]
 _________________________
 Milo resigned today from Breitbart.  What a loss to the cause of freedom!